How to choose a conference for publishing research papers?

Today, I will discuss how to choose conferences for publishing papers. It is important to make good choices because it can have a huge impact on a researcher’s career.

There are several things to consider for choosing a conference.

First, does the conference have a good reputation? Obviously, it is better to publish papers in conferences that have very good reputation. If someone publishes in good conferences, it will give more visibility to his work, and thus, it is more likely that other researchers will cite his papers. It will also look better in his CV and gives him a better chance of getting hired for jobs or getting grants.

However, the best conferences are sometimes very selective. For example, the top conferences in some fields like data mining can have acceptance rate below 10 %, which means that only 1 paper out of 10 or even less may be accepted. Therefore, it sometimes makes sense to submit papers to conferences with lesser reputation. However, one should avoid at all cost the conferences that have bad reputations. For instance, I know that for hiring professors at some universities, if someone has published in some conferences that I will not name, it will negatively affect the candidate’s chance of getting hired.

Another thing to consider is how difficult it is to get a paper accepted at a given conference? For top-level conferences, one needs to have very good research results to get accepted and also to write the paper very well. So it is important to ask this question: Does my paper has a good chance of getting accepted? To answer this question, one may read papers that were published in the conference proceedings the years before. It will give him an idea about how hard it is to get accepted. One thing that every researcher should know is that the “acceptance rate” of a conference that is sometimes advertised does not always reflect very well the difficulty of having a paper accepted. For example, some top conferences could have a 10 % acceptance rate, while some other may have a 20% acceptance rate. But it does not means that it is twice harder to get accepted for the former conference. Actually, the one with a 10 % acceptance rate could be much harder if it is a conference with a good reputation because it will be 10 % of the best papers instead of 20 % of some average papers.

Another important aspect to consider for choosing a conference is the location of the conference. The location is important because it does not cost the same amount of money to travel to every countries. Moreover, the registration fee of some conferences is cheaper than some others. Besides, a researcher should also think about which conference will provide him with the best opportunity to meet researchers that could be interested in his research to build collaborations and give him the best visibility.

The deadline of a conference and the review time is also important. I personally recommend to write down the conference dates and notification date of several conferences, and then to use this to make a plan. Where should I submit? If the paper is not accepted at conference A, then where could I submit my paper after that?

Also one should consider the format. This is very important because the format of papers and the maximum number of pages can vary widely from one conference to another. Moreover, one should check carefully if the pages are single-column or double-column. This can also make a huge difference on the overall length of the paper.

One should also check who publish the conference proceedings. Does the proceedings are published by a serious publisher or are they printed by the conference organizers at a local store? I recommend to only publish papers in conferences that are published by serious publishers and/or indexed in publication databases in your field. This is important because if someone publish papers in conference that are not indexed, in ten years from now, it is possible that nobody would know that these papers ever existed.

Another aspect to consider is the topic of the conference. Let’s say that someone is working on developing data mining algorithms that are applied to educational data. He could publish his research in several different conferences depending on the topic of the conferences. For example, he could publish his research in an educational data mining conference. He could submit to a data mining conference (educational data mining is a subfield of data mining). Alternatively, he could publish in an artificial intelligence conference (data mining is a subfield of artificial intelligence). Or he could publish in a very general Computer Science conference (artifical intelligence is a subfield of Computer Science). My advice is to not choose a conference that is too general.

Those are my advices for choosing a conference. Hope that this helps you! If you have some additional thoughts, please share them in the comment section. By the way, if you like this blog, you can subscribe to the RSS Feed or my Twitter account (https://twitter.com/philfv) to get notified about future blog posts. Also, if you want to support this blog, please tweet and share it!